Yann Martel

LIFE OF PI

As I suppose everyone who picks up this book will already know, its centrepiece is the story of a boy in a lifeboat with a tiger. After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship carrying zoo animals, the sole survivors are a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg, a female orang-utan and a adult Bengal tiger, together with a 16-year-old Indian boy nicknamed Pi. Before long only the boy and the tiger are left alive. The main part of the book is the story of the vicissitudes they go through: thirst, hunger, heat, exposure, exhaustion. And, of course, the narrator, Pi, is at constant risk of being killed by his ferocious companion.

The story obviously verges on the incredible, but for much of the book the reader's disbelief is held in check by the vividness with which the boy's experiences are described. He keeps himself alive by means of the survival equipment in the lifeboat and by fishing. He also has to feed the tiger, to prevent it from eating him. To avoid this fate, Pi calls on his extensive knowledge of how zoo animals think; he dominates the tiger by controlling it with a whistle and by making it feel seasick whenever it threatens to become aggressive.

This part of the narrative works pretty well; Pi's survival remains just about credible. However, you sense that magic realism is never far away and towards the end of the book it finally breaks through. I have to admit that this a genre I generally dislike and I began to be out of sympathy with the novel at this point. First, Pi goes temporarily blind and in that state encounters a second blind survivor in another boat who attempts to throttle him. This individual appears to be a hallucination but he is nevertheless killed and eaten by the tiger, so how literally are we supposed to take him?

Soon after this episode boy and tiger land on a mysterious floating island populated by meerkats. The island appears to be hospitable at first but later it turns out to have sinister properties. The whole island sequence is dreamlike in character and once again it is unclear how real it is supposed to be.

The concluding section of the book starts to play games with the narrative convention and takes us into Postmodernism. Pi makes landfall in Mexico and the tiger disappears into the hinterland. A pair of Japanese investigators interview Pi and manifestly disbelieve his story, so he produces an alternative (and distasteful) version involving cannibalism but no animals. The implication is that we all believe what we want to believe.

There is something else underlying all this. The book is mainly first-person narrative but it is purportedly told to the author by Pi himself, who is now middle-aged and living in Canada. The "author" first hears about the story from an old man in India who assures him that it will make him believe in God. And in the introductory section of the book, covering some 90-odd pages, Pi indulges in a lot of theological speculation as he becomes simultaneously Christian and Muslim as well as Hindu. I found this somewhat tedious and would probably have given up at that point had I not wanted to reach the shipwreck.

Martel, however, seems to want us to take the theological dimension seriously and I suspect that there is an implied connection between the magical realism that emerges towards the end and theology. I don't think the statement that the story will make us believe in God is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. For me, this places more metaphysical weight on the tale than it can reasonably be asked to bear.

11 March 2005